


Psmith and the Greek Spirit

by kindkit



Category: Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Courtship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:23:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all began with the jam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Psmith and the Greek Spirit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [masterofmidgets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/gifts).



It was the nature of Psmith's plans to be dignified, subtle, and so judiciously pursued that it was difficult to be sure when the pursuit had begun. In this case, the earliest point of certainty that Mike could afterwards establish was the incident of the jam, which occurred on a warm afternoon when Latin and maths had given way to the frivolities of toast.

'Do have some jam, Comrade Jackson,' Psmith said, with a gesture none the less stately for being performed with a butter-covered knife.

'No, thank you. I don't like figs. I've said.' Even the sight of Psmith spreading the brown concoction on his toast and consuming it was a thing Mike found difficult to tolerate. Experience--for Psmith had performed the foul act daily for some time--had not inured him.

'It is raspberry.'

'But you hate raspberries! You said they were jejune.'

'What a prodigious memory you have. My pronouncement, alas, was itself the product of a jejune, though keen, sensibility, a false sophistication such as brilliant young men are wont to embrace. What mature judgment could prefer the exotic seductions of the fig to the innocent simplicity of the raspberry? I repent me of my younger days.'

The younger days of Psmith's faulty judgment had occurred no more than a month ago, but Mike was too fond of both Psmith and raspberries to mention it. 'Well, thanks awfully,' he said. 'The school jam's not fit for dogs.'

A few days latter, when the jar of raspberry jam had been a quarter emptied and its surprising advent forgotten, Mike walked into the study and found it crammed full of hyacinths. All manner of vessels, from tooth-glasses to water-jugs, had been pressed into service as vases, and everywhere the eye could gaze, the room was blue and sweet.

Psmith, presumed to be the onlie begetter of the flowers, did not appear until an hour later. Mike had cleared a space on his table just large enough for a sheet of paper and was attempting to write an essay about the Sepoy Mutiny without moving his elbow. The effect proved soporific, and he fell into a doze out of which he struggled upon hearing the door.

'Ah,' said Psmith, in a soft tone that got entangled with Mike's fading dream of meadows.

Mike achieved an upright posture and turned. 'What on earth did you want with all these flowers?'

'There are times, Comrade Jackson, when a man longs for the beautiful hyacinth. Though he may not wish to, though he may have thought all such feelings burnt from him by the sacrificial fires of experience, yet he longs. And then he is overpowered.' Psmith had remained in the doorway, where he stood more than usually as though posed for a full-length portrait in oils by Holbein.

'I should think anybody would be overpowered by a cartload of the things. Wherever did you get them?'

'From the finest London florists. The blossoms were sent by train this morning and carried to school by the hearty yeomen of the town.'

'That must have cost a packet. I thought you were cleaned out.'

'What is the sale of a few trifling ornaments, the mere artificial products of man's imagination, compared to beauty painted by nature's own hand?'

'Ornaments? You - ' Mike looked about the room through gaps in the foliage. 'Your Greek statuette is gone. The one of the runner. Really, Smith, you are absurd sometimes.'

'Perhaps I am,' Psmith said. 'But I offer the counter-argument that it was only a Roman copy.'

'Ass.'

Psmith, at last consenting to break his pose and enter the room, caressingly moved a few bunches of flowers from tabletop to floor and sat down to work, or so Mike assumed. Ten minutes passed, and Mike, privately debating whether to verify the spelling of _Bullandshahr_ or to charge boldly into orthographical destruction like a schoolboy Light Brigade, realised that he hadn't heard the scratch of Psmith's pen or the customarily rapid turning of his page. Glancing up, he observed a Psmith ruminative, even rueful, as though he did think himself rather an ass.

There was something disheartening about it. Mike felt as though he'd idly kicked at a wall in Westminster Abbey and sent a great crack running up it.

'They're terribly pretty, Smith,' he said in an attempt at repairs. 'Before you came in I was quite longing for--you'll laugh--a meadow full of flowers I could roll about in.'

'A charming idea.' Psmith's face assumed one of its serene Renaissance half-smiles. 'If anything could make me regret heeding the stern voice of Duty when she summoned us from the frolicsome meadows of the Archaeological Society to the toilsome cricket pitch, it would be that. But in matters of duty, I am as the Spartan.'

It had been rather fun, Mike thought, those few archaeological afternoons when there'd been no village cricket going and he'd spent the hours lounging under a tree with Psmith. 'Let's invent a new game. Meadow cricket. Green branches for bats and flower stalks for wickets.'

'And you say I'm absurd? Comrade Jackson, we both know you would never alter the game one iota. It's the only thing you take seriously.'

'Oh, don't talk rot.'

'I never do,' Psmith said. 'I have not the gift. It is among the great tragedies of my life, that I am so painfully earnest.'

Mike would have given a good deal to be sure that Psmith didn't earnestly believe he cared for nothing but cricket. True, Mike would have been hard pressed to name three things he cared for more, but he felt certain that there were some. Psmith not thinking him a fool was probably one of them. 'I say, Smith,' he said, changing the subject in a direction perhaps not entirely fortunate if he wished to demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge, 'how d'you spell _Bullandshahr_?'

No more than four or five days after that, just long enough for the hyacinths to have begun withering and for the skivvy to have grudgingly removed them and washed all the jars, came the next development. It was after dinner, an hour in which boyish spirits turn naturally to ragging or idling as their natures incline them. Mike, although fond of both, instead trudged gloomily in Psmith's wake to their study and, with the sigh of one facing the scaffold, opened his books. His pen and his brain remained dry for some minutes. He sighed again.

'Come now,' said Psmith, looking and sounding as though his life were composed not of classes and ever more strenuous cricket practise but of leisurely Parisian strolls. 'I'm sure the little busy bee which doth improve each shining hour never sighed like that. Can it be that you find - '

'Greek composition.'

'Greek composition neither, if you will forgive a mixed reference, _dulce_ nor _utile_?'

'It certainly can. Downing's had some sort of brainwave about rhetoric. Write as though you were Plato, he says! If I were Plato I'd be writing in good English.'

'Comrade Jackson, with one mighty intellectual bound you overturn all we thought we knew about the Greeks.'

'In my own language, I mean, for heaven's sake. Nobody asked Plato to write in - in Egyptian or what have you. Between the grammar and trying to think what Plato would say about anything, it's enough to kill a chap. Downing wants it the day after tomorrow, too. When I ought to be concentrating on the Wrykyn match! You know how frantic Adair's been.' A yawn, wordless testimony to Adair's insistence that no effort should be spared to prepare for the great contest, stopped any further remarks.

Psmith set down his book. It was, Mike noticed, _The Symposium_ in Greek, which was not a school text. Psmith, without the slightest sign of effort, far outran the rest of the sixth form in Greek and Latin. He was excused classes and took private tuition with Mr. Everton, who was rumoured to have been a fellow of Corpus Christi until overwork, leading to a fervent conviction that the location of the Garden of Eden was encoded in _The Odyssey_ , brought him to Sedleigh to take up a more restful career. 'Never let it be said that Psmith turned his back upon his friend's need. I'll write it for you.'

'Really? That's jolly decent of you.'

'It will be my pleasure. I am never more at ease than when among the Greeks. But do read the product of my pleasant labours before you give it in. As we know, Comrade Downing is of a mistrustful nature. He may be inclined to interrogate one about such trifling matters as the content of one's essays.'

'I will. Thanks awfully, Smith.'

'While I write, perhaps you will refresh yourself with some tea. Your peachlike cheek grows pale with weariness. The world will grieve if your devotion to cricket, high and laudable though it be, should cost you your bloom.'

'I suppose you'd like a cup of tea if I happen to make any?'

'Yes, indeed. What an excellent thought.'

Mike made tea and went early to bed. The next morning before breakfast, Psmith handed him the essay. 'Stepping into Plato's sandals is conducive to enthusiasm; it may be a trifle long, but I daresay it is as much in the Greek spirit as Comrade Downing could wish, and possibly more so. But remember your promise, comrade. Do not, like impetuous Psyche or impatient Orpheus, forget your given word. Rather let your example be . . . oh, bother, I can only think of Jephthah for keeping vows, and that's not apt at all. Really, one wonders at its being in the Bible. Anyway, for heaven's sake read it first.'

Mike, blinking sleepily through a lecture purportedly about German unification but really about the Hunnish Threat, nearly did forget. But at length, even Greek began to seem preferable to Bismarck, and he read stealthily, soon growing so fixed upon the page that only blinding patriotism kept Mr. Downing from noticing his inattention.

Just before lunchtime, Mike pulled Psmith into a sheltered nook behind the bicycle shed where boys sometimes went to smoke. 'What do you mean giving me that essay? Do you want me to be expelled?'

Psmith freed his sleeve from Mike's grasp and smoothed it out. 'I thought the Greek was rather good. There are some figures of speech in the true classical style that could not fail to catch the admiring eye of a schoolmaster.'

'I doubt Downing will have an eye for style! All he'll see is that it's an essay about . . . about . . . '

'I believe you are referring, in your delicate way, to what is commonly yet mistakenly called the Greek vice. In fact a close study of such textual references as survive, along with the images upon Greek vases, shows that the Greeks preferred to practice copulation between the thighs rather than - '

'For God's sake, Smith!'

'And in any case, there is not an indecent word in the essay, nor a direct mention of erotic acts. I cannot see any grounds for objection.'

'It's about Plato going to Socrates for advice on how to seduce a boy!'

'"Court" is the more apt term, I believe. And while _eromenos_ has no English equivalent, the translator should strive to convey the implied affection and esteem. Therefore, I would say that in my little jeu d'esprit, the young Plato goes to Socrates for advice in courting his beloved.'

In the face of Psmith's smooth marble calm, Mike began to feel he was being excessively dramatic. He scrubbed his fingers through his hair, wishing for a basin of cold water to stick his head in until the fire in his brain went out. 'I still can't give the thing to Downing. He'd have me out of the school gates before he'd read half a paragraph. Honestly, Smith, what possessed you?'

'When a mind is kept in bounds,' said Psmith, looking at him keenly, 'and my dear comrade, what is school to the bold, original thinker but Pentonville with cricket? - when a mind is kept in bounds, it is inclined to take what little freedoms offer themselves. Between true comrades, there can and must be frankness. We can say what we think, without the politic restraints that must be used to protect masters and other frail spirits from the unconventional.'

'Well, it certainly was unconventional.' 

'In our day, under the light of a wearier sun, it is. To the Greeks, as you would know if our school books were not expurgated, it was not merely conventional but right.'

'That's - '

'Learn Greek, we are told from our first trembling days at prep school. Model yourselves upon the ancients, those epitomes of manly honour! Follow them in all things but one, which we will keep from you, forbid to you, about which we will deceive you with deliberation and method, although to them it was the essence of the manly honour we praise.'

It occurred to Mike that Psmith had, by a few strokes of oratory, worked himself into a chill, Psmithish rage. He'd never have imagined that books, or anything really, could discompose Psmith, and he'd have been inclined to laugh if it hadn't made Psmith rather striking: the angry Achilles reincarnated as an English schoolboy. 'It's a bit rotten to leave things out of books. I agree. But, well, we are Christians after all, not pagan Greeks.' 

'Christians!' said Psmith with a little laugh. 'Yes, I suppose we are.'

Mike, whose invariable habit during divine service was to think about cricket, did not feel entirely confident in his own argument. In the face of Psmith's accession to heroism, he could not think of another, nor remain certain that Psmith was wrong. If it was right to admire a fellow for being brave or clever or a brilliant slow bowler, why was it wrong to admire the graceful way he moved on the cricket pitch or notice how the sun shone on his hair? Most of the time Psmith talked a great deal of bosh, but now he seemed to be speaking from a clearer world, where no one tried to split feelings apart. As a point of view it had consistency on its side, and Psmith was the sort to find inconsistency--what might be called hypocrisy--irritating. 'Well,' Mike ventured soothingly, 'it's not as if we don't know. If I'd never heard of it I wouldn't have understood what you meant.'

'We know as in a glass darkly. We know in scandalised whispers and filthy jokes in the changing rooms.' Psmith kicked at the ground, a frustrated small-boy gesture, and then, as suddenly as the end of an enchantment, the old languid Psmith reappeared. 'But never mind. Come the revolution, Comrade Jackson, we shall see all things transformed. And not to neglect our immediate need, let us exchange this essay for one which the most timid rabbit of a schoolmaster, feeding skittishly upon the luscious growth of platitudes, may read without startlement.' He plucked the old essay from Mike's hands, secreted it in the depths of a portfolio, and handed Mike some fresh pages. 'These deal only and entirely with the virtue of honesty. If I have hidden a sting in them, Downing will never feel it. Now, come. Luncheon awaits us.'

Mike was relieved to turn to something as comprehensible as mutton stew.

Days passed in which Mike was too preoccupied to ponder Psmith's odd behaviour and unexpected vehemence. The match with Wrykyn came, was won, and passed in its turn, as did examinations. It was the end of term, those few shining days when all labours have ended and summer stretches forth a hand, beckoning youth to enjoyment. Mike went about delighted with Sedleigh and everyone in it, a delight not darkened, as it might have been at Wrykyn, by the fact that he was about to leave it forever. The only shadow upon the time was that Psmith was often not to be found, and then was strangely quiet and thoughtful. Perhaps he was remembering Eton and his old friends, as Mike couldn't help remembering Wrykyn now and then.

On the final evening of Mike's school days, at lights-out he reluctantly stopped exchanging cricket stories with his old foes Robinson and Stone, who had since become admirers if not friends. In the dormitory he found only Psmith, seated majestically upon the windowsill in his dressing gown of royal purple silk. 'Where's Jellicoe?'

'Comrade Jellicoe,' Psmith said, looking out into the gloaming, 'has gone to see Matron. All indications are that he will be spending the night in the infirmary.'

'Rotten luck. What's the matter?'

'By his groans and inarticulate complaints, one would guess something of a digestive nature, with perhaps a soupçon of appendix.'

'Really rotten luck,' Mike repeated, straining thus to express his hope that Jellicoe's appendix would prove merely inconvenient and not fatal. 

'I shouldn't worry. The brave Jellico, our companion through the trials of life or at least the trials of one draughty dormitory, has a constitution that makes him a model of health to all aspiring boys. I daresay he will spring up from his sickbed tomorrow morning with cheerful energy and eagerness to return to the loving bosom of the Jellicoe family.' This was delivered in a slightly rehearsed fashion which could not have been more unlike Psmith's normal manner.

'Well, I hope so. But you sound a bit off-colour too. It's no good moping about Eton, if that's what you're doing. It doesn't matter now anyway. You'll be up at Cambridge soon. No more prison of the youthful spirit, or whatever it was you said. No cricket if you don't want to, or first-rate cricket if you do. Your own rooms to fill with hyacinths, and Greek books with all the wicked bits intact, to read until your eyes fall out.'

'You've never asked why I was expelled from Eton,' Psmith said, turning from the window with an air of decision, and also of not having heard a word Mike had said.

'Of course not. That is . . . well, one doesn't.'

'One guesses. No, that's not fair. You haven't, I'm sure. The pride of the school, that's our Comrade Jackson. Never a cruel thought nor an unclean one. But then if this really were a book, you'd have knocked me down several chapters ago and manfully sent me to Coventry ever after.'

Mike, confused, was growing irritated, a condition he came to more readily because for days he'd been feeling the chill of Psmith's absence. 'What are you talking about? Can't you just be clear for once instead of turning everything into riddles?'

'I was expelled because I was caught buggering another boy.'

Mike sat down, feeling thick and gluey everywhere, like a large bowl of cold porridge. 

'Had you not requested plain speaking,' Psmith continued rapidly, 'I would have said "practising the Greek vice." That's what the headmaster told my father. I will say this much for his perspicacity: "practising" was the _mot juste_. We had by no means perfected it.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'You look ill. Was it really that much of a shock?' Psmith filled a glass of water and handed it to Mike, crouching beside his chair. 'Be careful of the glass, you're shaking. Oh, Mike, you bloody, bloody fool. I'm in love with you.'

Mike drank about half the water in desperate gulps, and spilled most of the rest down his shirt front. 'Me?' The Greeks, he thought, and manly love. Psmith had told him already, in his way, but Mike had never considered that it might mean more to Psmith than something to be outrageous about.

'Who else? Not Jellicoe, certainly.'

'Did you - is he really sick?'

'Of course not. I gave him five shillings to clear off, and another ten to keep quiet about it. But, comrade, I think we stray from the heart of the matter.'

Mike looked directly at Psmith for the first time since the word 'buggery' had been spoken. For once, Psmith looked eighteen instead of a world-weary thirty. A flush of nerves stained his colourless face and his expression was one of the acutest anxiety, like a vibrating wire strung tightly between fear and hope. His hand lay on the back of Mike's chair. 

'What do you mean, you love me?'

'Shall I take down the dictionary, or do you mean love according to Psmith? I want to share my jam with you, even if it means said jam must be raspberry. I want to see you lying in a meadow full of flowers. I want to lie there with you and introduce you to any number of Greek vices. I want to perfect them all with you through constant, assiduous practise.'

Mike sat unmoving, but his mind was racing through a term's worth of Psmith, all the great and little attentions Mike had vaguely attributed to friendship and which he now reconsidered under the name of love. He arrived at the moment when Psmith confessed to painting Downing's dog and had to stop, astonished. 

'It's all right,' Psmith said. 'You needn't decide anything now. I didn't - that's not why I wanted to be alone with you. I had to have a chance to tell you, that's all.' He got up and was suddenly tall again and rather far away. 'I'll write to you. I'll invite you to come and see me. Father and Mother won't mind. And if you don't feel . . . don't want . . . you need only say you're busy and that'll be the end of it. I don't suppose we'll run into each other at Cambridge very much, being in different colleges.'

Mike was not, in ordinary circumstances, given to thinking. His education had not encouraged it. Now thoughts seemed to form without his willing it, as swift and bright as cinematographic pictures: Psmith standing a few feet away, actually fidgeting with nerves; Psmith saying 'love' as though it wasn't only something one read in books; the Greek vices, which had never sounded as immoral or disgusting as what boys were expected to want to do with girls; the idea of the future that Mike had formed unknowing, in which Psmith was always beside him, every day. 

Different colleges at Cambridge, and never running into each other very much. Psmith had talked as though this might be the end. As though they could simply _stop_ and be nothing to each other.

And wasn't that what was supposed to happen? Friendship for life was the sort of thing the headmaster said in speeches about the dear old school, but no one ever meant it to be real. Men were supposed to get married and have sons for Eton or Wrykyn or Sedleigh, not stick to each other forever. In the life that everyone expected for them, they would send each other Christmas cards, or rather their wives would. They'd meet on Old Boys' Cricket day, shake hands and say that they really ought to see more of each other, if only they could find the time.

'Smith,' Mike said, and a few feet away Psmith jerked as though he'd been caught daydreaming in class. 'I've got to think, I - but - ' He held out a hand, and after a long moment Psmith crossed the room and took it. Psmith's hand was large, its fingers wrapping firmly around Mike's. It was a hand to be trusted with anything. 'Don't go.'

'I won't.' Psmith came closer, resting his other arm along the back of Mike's chair again. 'Did you think it was a threat? I only meant that you wouldn't want me hanging about.' 

'I don't want you to go.' 

For perhaps five long minutes they were silent and still, hands clasped, Psmith's arm nearly touching Mike's shoulders and the silk of his dressing gown brushing Mike's cheek. There was comfort in Psmith's nearness, and a low, humming, electrical pleasure that grew when Mike thought of turning, of touching him. Mike felt entirely changed by every breath of Psmith's, and yet entirely the same, no more degenerate or unspeakable than he had been before. Love, vice: whatever name it had, it was nothing more foreign or more frightening than this.

'Are you all right?' Psmith asked softly. 'I thought you knew, or at least suspected. I hadn't reckoned on innocence, not really.'

'It doesn't matter. I know now.'

'Do you? You've been kind. Generous and kind, of course, you're never anything else. But there's such a thing as being too kind.'

Mike shook his head, and in further refutation, laid his free hand atop the hand of Psmith's that he was holding, and stroked it. 

Just then they heard footsteps outside, and broke apart. It was Mr. Outwood, making his eleven o'clock rounds. He never tried for stealth, but they had been too distracted to hear him earlier. The door opened and Mike stood, fright buzzing in his ears.

'Now, gentlemen,' said Mr. Outwood, observing nothing, it seemed, but that boys on the verge of leaving might be inclined to relax their observation of school rules and sit up illicitly in the dark. 'It's late, and I know you wouldn't want to set a bad example for the younger fellows. You must go to bed.'

'Of course, Mr. Outwood.' Psmith's voice was a trifle unsteady to Mike's ears, but the perception only came of knowing him so well. For now that the shock of revelation was fading, Mike felt he knew Psmith better than anyone, and always had. 'Our transgression, though culpable in itself, had love as its motive. We were speaking of dear old Sedleigh and how we shall miss it.'

'Leaving school is always a wrench,' said kindly Mr. Outwood, for whom it had been such a wrench that he had become a schoolmaster and would never have to leave again. 'But carry the spirit of Sedleigh into the world and it will sustain you. Good night, Smith, Jackson.'

'Good night, sir.'

They listened as Mr. Outwood's steps diminished down the corridor. 

'We shall always have to worry about being caught,' Psmith said after a while. 'That is, if you even want - '

'Come here,' Mike said, reaching out his hand again. Psmith took it, setting something small but important right in the world, and Mike knew that any further thought was useless. He had already decided. 'Outwood's right about one thing. We should go to bed.'

'Oh. Yes. That would . . . ' Psmith trailed off, looking remarkably stupid with amazement. 'Are you sure?'

'I don't think I'm ready for the Greek vices yet. But this . . . ' He came close, pressing his face into Psmith's shoulder because he didn't quite dare to look at him. 'I like this.'

One of Psmith's hands touched his back lightly, ready to fly away again if rejected. 'I shall be a perfect pagan gentleman, I swear,' he said, his voice low and rather hoarse. 'But I should like to put my arms around you properly and have you near me.' 

'Yes,' Mike said, and followed him to bed. 

It was a narrow space for two young men, perhaps purposely so, but they would have lain entwined in any case. Mike could hear the rapidity of Psmith's heartbeat, which matched his own. Between them was a curbed eagerness, the promise of something nearly ready to begin. This was a first night, not a last one. It was not the end of anything that mattered.


End file.
